HHS is requesting information on provisions in HIPAA rules that may present obstacles to value-based care without meaningfully contributing to privacy and security of protected health information and patients being able to exercise their rights with respect to their PHI.

60% of people aged 18-34 admit to overusing their smartphones, the highest of any age level. Also, 63% of the respondents reported that they made efforts to limit their use of smartphones, with roughly 50% experiencing some level of success doing that.

Alaska Maritime Physicians is currently working with DrChrono to provide electronic health records (EHR) solutions to its physicians, who use this in conjunction with iPads and iPhones to provide treatment to patients remotely at sea. Doctors handle treatment, recovery and triage using Apple’s technologies and DrChrono.

A $125,000 HIPAA fine provides a cautionary tale for physician practices about the need to protect patient privacy. In other news, California’s right-to-die law survives court challenge, U.S. life expectancy drops again as opioid deaths and suicide rates climb and other health-related news.

Ignoring set rules/regulations for health startups could have huge impacts on the viability of an idea. If ignored, health startups could suffer a range of penalties from government supervisory agencies.

There are known existing federal privacy laws that protect research participants access to their own data, including the HIPAA Privacy Rule, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the Privacy Act. As regards to these laws individuals are to be granted rights to have access to their data and not restricted to the subset of data that meets certain quality standards.

The three hospitals (Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center) were fined for allowing ABC film a documentary on site without obtaining patient authorization

Azar’s waiver, part of his declaration of a public health emergency in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, applies to provisions that generally require covered hospitals to give patients the opportunity to agree or object to sharing information with family members or friends involved in their care.

ClearData officials have said that expanding coverage for Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft and others, would make it easier for hospitals and health systems to comply with a host of data privacy regulations.

Health insurerscollect patient information from social media posts to TV habits, marital status, level of education etc. and feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

Continuous risks posed by insiders are making penalties for violations to become more frequent. A criminal violation can occur as a result of an intentional act which is in violation of HIPAA privacy or security requirements

The judge wrote in the decision that the undisputed material facts made available to him established that MD Anderson “was not only aware of the need to encrypt devices in order to assure that confidential data including ePHI not be improperly disclosed, but it established a policy requiring the encryption and protection of devices containing ePHI.

Andrew Kennedy and Josh Magri, leaders in the Financial Services Roundtable believe that data centers are tied, since the new upgrade shifts the receiver from the enterprise to the individual, making it difficult for network threats to be scanned in real time

Location-based ads are being used by personal injury law firms to target patients when they enter emergency rooms. The trend has raised concerns among patients, government officials and health privacy experts.